Mardan Palace Hotel, Antalya, Turkey

29 May 2009 by James Aufenast

It cost £1b and has 10,000sq m of gold leaf - the owners of a new hotel in Turkey seem not to have noticed that there's a recession on. So will it succeed and, more importantly, is it in good taste?

Recession, what recession? When you can build 180,000sq m of opulence with Hermes crockery worth £1.35m and a 23,000sq m of Italian marble, it seems the mere fact there's a global downturn matters little in the world of glitter and de luxe.

Built on the Antalya coast, on what some are calling the European Dubai, the Mardan Palace hotel opened this week. The man behind it is billionaire Telman Ismailov, president of Russian property development company AST.

Ismailov is famous for paying Jennifer Lopez $1.5m to sing for him on his birthday three years ago, and has spared nothing in creating a piece of luxury in the hotel arena. There's also a man-made beach with sand imported from Egypt by the hotel, and a UEFA-standard 8,000-capacity football stadium, plus 2,400 fish in an aquarium sunk into the main swimming pool.

But is this rightly an attempt to bring back the days of the Ottoman Empire, as the press material has it, or a rather over-the-top tasteless snub to the suffering of the rest of us? Judge for yourself from our visual tour.

MARDAN PALACE HOTEL

Kundu Köyü Oteller Mevkii Lara 07110 Antalya, Turkey
00 90 242 310 4100
www.mardanpalace.com
Capacity: 560 rooms
Rate per night: €360-€14,000

1. The lobby